


Made in His Image

by america_oreosandkitkats



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Heavy Narcotics Use, The 90s, Unregulated Financial Markets, Violent Implications, dubious business practices
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-20
Updated: 2016-09-20
Packaged: 2018-08-16 03:34:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,480
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8085280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/america_oreosandkitkats/pseuds/america_oreosandkitkats
Summary: "Now, if you don’t remember what First Order Inc. is or why the company folded, or why its CEO—and only its CEO—Armitage Hux went to prison, that’s okay. FOI detonated in October 1999 and was promptly overshadowed by 9/11 and and the collapse of larger companies during the Great Recession."Trying to find enough information to make an entertaining fourth season of Serial regarding the rise and fall of First Order Incorporated, is proving to be a daunting task for Sarah Koenig and her team (it's almost as though someone has very meticulously weeded out any information regarding its former employees, especially the Board). When a clue takes them to the middle of nowhere Kentucky, face-to-face with a witness to the company's swift and devastating fall named Rey, Sarah learns that for every prize, there is a price and for every Galatea, there is a Pygmalion.





	

**Author's Note:**

> ~~creative title is creative, I know.~~  
>   
>  Welcome to my contribution to the 2016 Reylo Anthology. I know it's taken me a considerable amount of time to get this up, but these last couple of weeks have been CRAZY what with moving overseas and all, but in any case, it is here and it is done! :)
> 
> Before we get started, I wanted to give some proper shoutouts. First and foremost to the brilliant Reylo Anthology team. They have done such a wonderful job corralling both writers and artists, trying to get each fic to its best possible state. This project, as many of you may already know, was a bit rocky towards the beginning of the year, but they managed to make this magic. Thank you guys so, so much!
> 
> Secondly, I wanted to give another round of applause to my (non-anthology) betas, both of whom are on the tumbls: [221bdisneystreet](http://221bdisneystreet.tumblr.com/) and [whiggity](http://whiggitymacabee.tumblr.com/). In fact, there were some scenes towards the end of this behemoth that wouldn't exist without Ms. Whiggity's careful eye. Thanks again, friends.
> 
> Now without further ado, let's get this show on the road!

** **

**EPISODE 1: THE COMPANY**

I hate to admit it—but when the crew and I were putting together the story to follow this season, we were pretty stumped. Not for want of subjects either, it’s just we weren’t sure what direction to take the podcast. When you shoot for the moon and actually land on it, where do you go from there?

But, as it always seems to happen, we sort of stumbled into the topic for our fourth season.

 

 _When the last person entered the conference room and they were about to begin, Dana closed the blinds. There was a particularly cold front coming down from Canada and in conjunction with Lake Michigan just_ being _there, it hadn’t stopped snowing for nine days straight. So, having a full-frontal view of the white menace piling up and knowing what the evening’s commute would be like would only make the meeting more unbearable._

_The first meeting of the year was always the hardest, though not for want of topics. They had enough internal leads and enough suggestions from The People coming down the pike that they needed a whole team of interns to sift, tag and organize them. Though, that was probably part of the problem. Too many ideas can be just as crippling as not enough._

_The room smelled like tepid, slightly tinny coffee from the Keurig and stale bagels that probably should have been tossed yesterday. Sarah stirred hers absently as she went down the agenda. The interns had put together twenty three reports on potential season four topics and they were going to go through them one by one._

_“One through eleven today,” she said, “and twelve through twenty three tomorrow. We’ve got more murders, more international political intrigue, more domestic policy entanglements. More, more, more.”_

_A box sat beside her, filled with the blue one-inch binders, put together by the interns. She passed them around the table to their team of six._

_“Who fucking put_ Benghazi _in here?” Dana said, looking over the table of contents. The table groaned._

_“Aaron, I’m sure,” Ira grumbled. “Who’s in charge of the interns? Kevin? Talk to that Aaron kid. I’m tired of his crap.”_

_“All in favor of striking number thirteen?” Sarah asked. The table responded in enthusiastically in tow._

_“I think,” Julie said, twisting her mouth in contemplation, “that the first thing we should do is go over our last couple of seasons. It’ll help us focus. Maybe we can find something that fits narratively with the rest.”_

_Ira took that as his cue to wheel towards the white board. He stood, uncapped the blue marker, and wrote:_

Season 1  
Who killed Hae Lee?  
(crime drama)  
  
Season 2  
Why did Bo Bergdahl walk off his base in Afghanistan?  
(int’l rel; WOT)  
  
Season 3:  
Who killed Anna Politkovskaya?  
(int’l rel, crime drama)  
  
Season 4:  
???

 

We stared at that white board for what felt like several hours with hardly a word passing between the five of us. We took breaks. We talked about the other cases the interns had profiled. But we kept coming back to the board, and none of us had felt that _spark_.

I know it’s going to sound a little corny, but ever since our first season, we look for stories that have a _spark_. Stories that have some kind of innate essence that snaps at our attention and says, “Yes me! I’m over here.” These are stories that always leave us asking “And then what happened next?”

At the end of a very long workday and without much progress having been met, Julie was the first to surrender. She hit the lights, turned on the projector, and pulled up her Netflix queue. There was one vote for _Hot Fuzz_ , mine, and three votes for _Wall Street_ —the 1987 movie with Charlie Sheen and Michael Douglas—because that’s the kind of people I work with.

 

_“Jesus, Julie, we work in investigative journalism. There’s no reason for you to have as many documentaries on your rec list as you do,” Emily said. She closed her binder and slid it to the side._

_“Gotta keep an eye on the competition,” Julie remarked as she scrolled through her queue. After a moment or two, documentaries gave way to a section of honest to goodness films._

_Something on the scroll caught Sarah’s attention. She looked up from her phone, from which she was texting her husband about potential dinner plans that night. “Put me down for_ Hot Fuzz _,” she said. “We could use something light and funny after today.”_

_Indeed, that day’s outlines included stories about the Black Hawk Down tragedy in Somalia back in the 90s, the many-layered complex issues which led to the Detroit water crisis, as well as smaller stories like a seven year old boy found dead in a box in a small Ohio town back in 1958._

_“I didn’t know_ Wall Street _was on Netflix,” Ira exclaimed. “That’s a good movie.”_

 _“Something_ light _, Ira,” Sarah protested._

 _“No, no._ Wall Street _is a good movie,” Dana said. “It’s kind of corny in that 80s, big money kind of way.”_

_“Didn’t it win an Oscar for something?” Cecily asked._

_“I don’t care.”_

_“Sarah, you’ve got your phone out. Why don’t you check?” Ira prodded._

_“I don’t—” Sarah stopped and sighed and put her phone back in her bag. “Listen, we’ve been dealing with some pretty heavy subjects this morning and afternoon and_ if _we’re going to take company time by watching a movie, I at least want to laugh.”_

 _Julie clapped her hands and rubbed them together. “So. What’ll it be team?” she asked. “All in favor of_ Wall Street _say aye.”_

 _Five voices chorused an_ aye _, leaving Sarah the sole dissenting vote. She grumbled her acquiescence, but declared that she was going to step out to get a cup of real coffee and asked the team if they wanted anything to munch on. She took their orders and her purse and left the office._

 _When she returned, with a large bag from Panera in tow and snowflakes on her shoulders, Michael Douglas, as Gordon Gekko, stood before the House Committee, microphone in hand and nothing but cocksure arrogance. He was a damn good actor and definitely deserved the Oscar he won for this role. Sarah_ had _looked up what awards the movie had won while she waited for the bagels._

 

Big movies have big quotes, and _Wall Street_ was no different. Even if you haven’t seen the movie, you know what Michael Double declares as gospel before the House Committee.

 

 **Gordon Gekko:** Greed, for lack of a better term, is good. Greed is _right_.

 

I almost dropped my coffee when I heard that. Not only because it brought me back to introduction of economics class in undergraduate, but because it’s the same thing a stockbroker caught in one of the biggest, most unremembered cases of 1999 said on trial. It’s on record, in public documents.

Now, if you don’t remember what First Order Inc. is or why the company folded, or why its CEO—and _only_ its CEO—Armitage Hux went to prison, that’s okay. FOI detonated in October 1999 and was promptly overshadowed by 9/11 and and the collapse of larger companies during the Great Recession.

 

 **The Court:** Why did you and the other board members make this company, Mr. Hux? That is, I think, what we’re failing to understand here.

 **The Defendant:** Greed, for lack of a better term, is good. Greed, madam, is right.

 

That’s Martha Grant, federal prosecutor. This was part of Hux’s sentencing hearing almost a year later. He’d just been convicted of securities fraud, insider trading, and money laundering.

Now, there aren’t many videos, pictures or recordings of Hux or the trial. We’ll get to that in a bit. But when you look at the few that are there, like the Forbes article we’ll link to in the shownotes, a few things jump out at you right away. First, the kid looks sinister.

I don’t use that term flippantly either. _Kid_. Hux is 33 at his sentencing, but he only looks about 25. It’s like someone plucked him straight out of Harvard Business School, stuffed him in a Tom Ford suit, and told him to dive onto a spit. Despite all his posturing though, he absolutely does not seem to be the mastermind behind this multi-billion dollar company.

Kevin scribbled something down and after the movie was over, he pinned it next to the other sheets. _Season Four. What happened to First Order Inc.?_

[From _This American Life_ and WBEZ Chicago, this is _Serial_ , a story told week by week. I’m Sarah Koenig.](https://soundcloud.com/islands/01-bad-dream-the-theme-1)

 

***

 

The first thing we realized when we started our preliminary investigation was how incredibly small FOI’s case really was. You would think that this was the rise and fall of a Mom and Pop Italian restaurant in Manhattan. There were few newspaper articles about the company, mostly from the Times, but buried deep in the finance section, a few photographs of Hux (and _only_ Hux), and a brief interview by, of all things, _Forbes_. In all, the material we had barely covered the small table in our conference room.

 

_Dana framed her face with her hands and stared at the table. Sarah read the article from the Post for what felt like the eighteenth time. Julie scribbled something on her notepad._

_“Jesus Christ…is that it?” Dana asked. She looked up from the few pages of information they had. “This can’t be it.”_

_“That,” Sarah said, pointing to the table, “is us literally scraping the barrel.”_

_“What does Kevin have?” Julie asked._

_“The same,” Sarah responded. “And a bad hangover.”_

_“We had more stuff for the Politkovskaya case,” Julie muttered. “Hell, we had more for Adnan’s case.”_

_“To be fair, Jules,” Dana said, “the Politkovskaya case has been written about pretty extensively, and the Adnan case was_ given _to us by people who had been working on it for years.”_

_“This cannot be it,” Sarah muttered, tossing the Post article back on the table._

 

It’s not like when Lehman Brothers went under that their executives, brokers, hell, their secretaries, just disappeared off the face of the planet. Even our interns couldn’t find anything outside of the handful of articles we had. We couldn’t find a single thing outside of this one person, Armitage Hux, and even then I’m willing to bet it wasn’t the whole truth.

What was going _on_ here?

Securities fraud, money laundering, insider trading and I’m sure the other smaller things FOI was never charged for are felonies—shock of shocks. So, the FBI is involved.

I reached out to a friend of mine at the Bureau. He works in counterterrorism, but you know how it goes. Ask a buddy if they know anything. He asks his. She asks hers. This trail of inquiries led me to New York City, and an agent by the name of Poe. He’s asked that I not use his last name.

Poe speaks with a bit of a drawl and looks less like an FBI agent and more like he belongs on a poster telling kids how cool it is to fly fighter jets. It makes sense then, that he received his bachelor’s from the Air Force Academy—it hangs right next to his law degree from Georgetown, as well as a number of certifications, recognitions, and photographs of him receiving those accolades.

 

_Poe gestured to the seats before his desk as they entered the room. Sarah picked the one on the right and Poe scooted their chairs a little closer to the desk before he settled behind his. He leaned back and laced his fingers over his stomach. His grin was amiable and sincere._

_“So,” he said. “What can I do for you today, Mrs. Koenig? Big fan of the show, by the way.”_

_“Thanks,” she responded. “And Sarah is just fine.”_

_Poe nodded. “Sarah.”_

_She pulled out her tape recorder, her notebook and the painfully slim manilla envelope of articles out of her purse. “I was hoping we could talk a little about the First Order Inc. case of 2000.”_

_Poe’s grin went tight. He clicked the roof of his mouth before he spoke. “Jess tell you I was on that team?”_

_Sarah nodded. “Miss Pava said you weren’t just on the team, but you were its head investigator.”_

_He nodded. “I was.”_

_Sarah gave her recorder a little shake. “Well…do you mind speaking to me about the case then? On the record.”_

_Poe’s eyebrows knitted, and he leaned in._

_“Is that all you’re here for today?” he asked. “I mean…you didn’t have to come all the way to New York for that. I’m sure there’s been a ton of stuff written about it. It’s not like FOI was a small case or something.”_

_“You’ll be our first big lead since we got started,” Sarah said emphatically._

_Poe blanched. He blinked and shook his head. “What do you mean?”_

_“I mean,” Sarah explained, “that there_ hasn’t _been a lot written about the case.” She gestured to the envelope. “That envelope is as much information as we’ve got.”_

_He reached for the folder and leafed through the articles. “You can’t be serious.”_

_“We’ve scoured the internet and the physical copies, and there doesn’t seem to be_ any _written testament of the events. It’s like this didn’t happen at all.”_

_“A lot of old stuff is pretty hard to find online,” Poe offered._

_“Our research staff is full of paid Millennial interns. They know what they’re doing,” Sarah said. Poe smirked at that._

_“You’ve got court transcripts and audio at least, right?”_

_Sarah shrugged. “Some. But not all.”_

_“Jesus.”_

_“But that’s why I’m here, Mr. Dameron—to talk to you about what happened.”_

 

Poe didn’t have much on-hand. The binder he gave me had more to go off of than our few articles, but not much more. The rest, he said, was in the archives, which was going to require some finagling to get to.

But as I looked through the papers, making notes in my head about potential others to speak to, I noticed something in the subject of these documents. They were laser-focused on Hux. Just like in _our_ articles, there wasn’t any mention of anyone else on the board, or even any other staff members. First Order Inc. might as well have been an alias for Armitage Brendol Hux.

But why?

 

_“Why are there only photos of Armitage?” Sarah asked, looking up from the binder. The page she had left off on was Hux’s despicable, smarmy mugshot. She covered his face with her arm._

_“He’s the only one we caught,” Poe said. He made a face and shrugged. “We offered him a shorter prison sentence if he turned in the rest of the board, but he took the fall for all of them.”_

_“All of them?” Sarah rose her eyebrow._

_Poe nodded. He held out his hand, fingers splayed. “There were five board members, Hux included, and he took the fall for every single one of them.”_

_“And they just disappeared.”_

_“When you have that much money, not even the NSA can find you.”_

_Sarah closed the binder and let Poe’s words settle for a moment before speaking up again. “Do you think there’s going to be more about the company itself in the archives?”_

_Poe shrugged again. “Probably. I mean—it’s been more than ten years since the case. I couldn’t tell you what’s in or what isn’t in that box.”_

_“When do you think you could get back to me with it?”_

_Poe hummed. “A week probably. Ten days at the absolute latest.”_

_Poe looked at her for a hard second, chin propped up by his hand and eyes narrowed. “You can probably give Larson Tekka a call.” Poe took out his phone and scrolled through the phonebook until he found the number._

 

I asked Poe if there was anyone I could talk to while he tried to get into the archives. He gave me the number of a DEA agent who had been trying to nab the board of First Order Inc. on drug trafficking charges. But it wasn’t just the DEA who was trying to pin down the FOI with some kind of charge. The House Committee on Securities Exchange, was hot on the FOI’s trail as well.

 

 **Sarah Koenig:** And _Interpol_?

 **Poe:** Oh yeah. Where do you think they were scrubbing their money? In Switzerland. Of course the Europeans got involved.

 **Sarah Koenig:** So…let me get this straight. You’re telling me that there were multiple federal organizations and Interpol looking into this company, but all we have is a 500 word Forbes article?

 **Poe:** It would appear to be that way, I suppose.

 

At the time of that conversation, we’re about six weeks into the research portion of the story. Typically, we’re in this part for most of the year. This is where we not only plan out our angle for the season, but we make rough outlines for which leads to follow and we start to build a report with them. So, on the one hand, these initial interviews are typical. But on the other hand…

With Adnan’s and Anna’s stories, there was enough evidence to suggest one outcome or the other. In Bo’s story, the crux of that season wasn’t uncovering a mystery, but seeing just how far the ripples of one man’s decisions went. What we had with First Order Inc. was an honest to goodness, old school mystery. Great for ratings. Great for journalism as an art.

But, I can’t tell you what direction this season is going to take us because now we’re in the execution phase, and the whole point of this show is that we uncover things in real time. That being said, after that initial meeting with Poe, I couldn’t help but wonder if we were stepping foot into something much more nefarious. Something didn’t, and still doesn’t, feel right about this situation.

I called Mr. Tekka a few hours after I left Poe’s office, and he agreed to have a conversation with me. He lives in New Jersey, across the river from Philadelphia.

Larson Tekka has been retired from the DEA for about as long as some of our younger listeners have been alive. He’s just celebrated his seventy-second birthday, but you wouldn’t think that by looking at him. His hair is white and the years have etched wrinkles in his face, but he has a fantastic sense of humor and carries himself with an almost aristocratic air. He reminds me of Frasier in that sense.

Ask your parents who Frasier was, kids.

 

_Larson Tekka’s home was clean and sparingly decorated, but the scent of warm vanilla that carried through the hallways gave it a decidedly homey feeling. He led Sarah into the dining area and asked her if she wanted anything to drink after her long train ride from Manhattan. She obliged—tea with honey._

_She sat at the table and pulled out her things—the tape recorder, a notebook and the slim folder of First Order Inc. articles. While she waited, Sarah caught notice of the row of bookcases in the living room. There were a few photographs and awards standing in between thick, hardback tomes on the shelves. The photographs were framed in thin gold filigree, the awards wrapped in thick silver. They were a little too far for her to see clearly, but one image made her pause. She took note of it and told herself to ask him about it later._

_Larson set the mug in front of her and settled across the table with his own cup of tea. She took a sip—fruity and sweet. Not exactly what she enjoyed in her teas, but something she could endure for the sake of politeness._

_“You have a lovely home, Mr. Tekka,” Sarah said._

_“Thank you. Larson is just fine. My wife liked to keep things neat and tidy, like a magazine spread. When she passed, I figured the easiest way to keep that up was to get rid of the most unnecessary things. And honestly? Most of it is unnecessary.”_

_“Is she the woman in that picture over there?” Sarah gestured to the image that had caught her attention._

_Larson laughed. “Oh goodness no._ That’s _Senator Organa. A long time, treasured friend, but honestly nothing more than that.”_

_“The New York Senator, Leia Organa?” She returned her attention to Larson._

_He took a sip of his tea. “The very one in the same.”_

_“One of my colleagues covered her campaign back in ’88. The midterm,” Sarah said. “Wasn’t her whole running platform against the growing financial market and trying to reign it in?”_

And that’s when things started to turn to the strange—again.

_“She did the best she could, given the circumstances,” Larson said. “I think they all tried their best. But you’re not here to talk about Senator Organa. You’re here for information about the First Order nonsense.”_

_“Nonsense is a fairly apt term for the whole thing. Can you believe that_ that _—” Sarah gestured to the folder on the table “—is all I have on the company?”_

_Larson reached over and took it. He leafed through it, a puzzled look upon his face._

 

Really strange. Take a listen. This is still early in our initial conversation, and I had just shown Mr. Tekka our slim folder of initial reports.

 

 **Larson Tekka:** Well, that does seem rather peculiar. You said you talked to Poe already?

 **Sarah Koenig:** That’s how I got your number.

 **Larson Tekka:** Well, when you have enough money, even the NSA can’t find you.

They both said, “If you have enough money, even the NSA can’t find you.” I know it’s an appropriate reference to make, but even so. Something felt off. Something felt scripted. It would be naive of me to assume that he _couldn’t_ be hiding anything. I’ve been doing this job for far too long to make those kinds of leaps of faith. But I couldn’t prove anything by it, nor was I sure there was anything _to_ prove. This job job requires us to listen to our instincts and pay attention to our hunches, but sometimes, they can send us off cliffs of no return.

 

_“How long was the DEA looking into First Order Inc.?” Sarah asked._

_“We started hearing about the kinds of parties they were having during work hours pretty early on. So, probably about…” he grimaces in thought, “two years.”_

_“What kind of drug charges were you looking to pin them on?” Sarah asked, jotting a note down._

_“Possession, mostly. But there was bits of trafficking in there too.”_

_Sarah furrowed her brows. She looked up. “What_ didn’t _these guys do?”_

_“Large arms trading. But I wouldn’t be surprised if they weren’t in someway connected with a group that was.”_

_“So, considering the fact that FOI’s official charges are money laundering and securities fraud—financial, white collar crimes— I take it you weren’t successful in your investigation.”_

_“On the contrary,” Larson said. He set his mug down audibly. “No, officially we did not ‘nab’ them on drug possession charges, but we were crucial in helping the FBI bring them in. We all were.”_

_“We?”_

_“The four concurrent investigations. It was us, the FBI, the SEC and Interpol. I think I was talking to Poe almost every night for updates. Someone in my division was talking to Lyon.”_

_Larson kept talking, but Sarah stopped listening—a thought had come to her. She dropped her pen and picked up her phone and went to Google._

_“Senator Organa was on the Senate Committee for Securities and Exchange,” she said. Sarah set her phone down. “Were you in talks with her or her committee during this process?”_

_Without missing a beat, Larson said emphatically, “No.” Sarah wrote this down._

Despite concerns about corroborated stories, from that initial conversation, here’s what I learned.

Clintonian era financial markets were basically fueled by an abundance of alcohol and, in Larson’s words, “a fuckton of cocaine.” So, First Order Inc. wasn’t particularly special for their want and pursual of the drug. What made them different though, and what brought the DEA knocking on their door was their involvement in trafficking.

 

 **Larson Tekka:** That’s what made this company so dangerous. They weren’t just screwing people out of millions of dollars, but they were trying to eke into the cocaine business. They even caught the attention of a few local gangs. Honestly, if it wasn’t for our involvement, someone was going to get shot. Someone— scores of people—were going to die.

 **Sarah Koenig:** Was it pure?

 **Larson Tekka:** God no. _Another_ reason we had so many teams trying to take them in. I don’t remember exactly what they mixed it all with, but it wasn’t just straight cocaine.

 

_Larson stirred his tea with a small, delicate spoon before he took another sip of it. Then he spoke again. “They used to sell their dimes in these little balls, wrapped up in plastic.” He wrapped his thumb around his forefinger, making a circle about the size of a nickel. “D’you know what they called them?”_

_Sarah shook her head._

_“Starkillers. You could get one of these for fifty bucks and a high that would last for days.”_

_“That’s a rather specific detail,” Sarah said. She marked that down—starkiller—and underlined it three times. She thought of other people she could reach out to that might be able to point them in the direction of a dealer, of someone who could maybe identify a First Order employee._

_“We had someone on the inside,” Larson said. Sarah almost dropped her pen, let alone her jaw. “Good kid. Smart kid. Went turn coat for us. He wanted nothing to do with them.”_

_“You_ had _someone?” A name, something, anything._

_Larson nodded, then asked if she wanted a refill on her tea._

 

The DEA was able to get half of their information on the First Order’s business and trafficking due to one employee. I don’t know his real name and neither does Larson, so that will make reaching out to him a little difficult. But back in the 1990s, he was known among the Agency as Informant FN-2187. Some of them, Larson included, just knew him as Finn.

Needless to say, Larson didn’t have a picture of him either.

Finn came to the DEA. He told him he didn’t know too much about their illegal financial business, but he knew about the trafficking. I’ll let Larson tell Finn’s story. But, before I play the clip, I’ll remind you guys that _Serial_ has a tendency to get graphic and disturbing. A lot of our material is about heinous crimes. This story is no exception.

 

 **Larson Tekka:** Finn reached out to one of our low level staffers and his story eventually made it up to me. He said he was tired of fighting for them, of doing their dirty work. They had him working the phones for a while, but when they realized how personable he was, how much of a natural leader he was, how well he could keep a secret, they took him out of that and into the trafficking “department.” His words, not mine. He’s given a gun and instructions— _do not lose the package_.

_(pause)_

**Larson Tekka** : On his first “mission,” he tells me this black van took him to someplace on the border.

 **Sarah Koenig:** The Mexican border?

 **Larson Tekka:** The very one. FOI wanted to cut out as many middle men as they possibly could. They’d have gone to El Salvador themselves to get it, but that would have cost too much money. It was cheaper to pay KS-119, the main cartel, directly. Anyway, there was some kind of skirmish in one of the…well, it’s hard to call ’em villages, and the KS-119ers just wiped them all out. All of ’em. Women, kids, old folks. Just dead on the street.

 **Sarah Koenig:** Oh my god.

 **Larson Tekka:** You don’t mess with the KS-119.

 **Sarah Koenig:** And you believed him?

 **Larson Tekka:** It was a hard pill to swallow at first, but he backed up his claims.

 

_Sarah leaned in, chin propped up by her fist. “How did he do that?” she asked._

_Larson was looking into his mug, as though he were trying to fish out old memories from the sweet brew. He opened his mouth and breathed in, about to say something, but he stopped._

_Sarah bit the inside of her cheek rather than slide in closer. She pressed her pen into the page._

_He looked up, and his expression had hardened. “It’s blurry,” he said, and Sarah wanted to scream. She hated when this happened._

_“What can you remember?” she asked, telling herself to keep an even tone._

_Larson made a face and shook his head. “Nothing’s really coming to mind. But whatever it was, it was convincing, so we took him on.”_

_Sarah ran her tongue across her teeth. She didn’t tap her pen or her foot. She didn’t sigh. She didn’t even blink._

_Larson’s eyes were an earnest, honest blue. He was the first to fold, the first to drop his gaze to his hands._

_“I can’t get you to Finn myself,” Larson said, “but I could probably get you to someone who can.”_

_“That would be helpful, thank you.”_

 

From Larson and his charming home in New Jersey, I found myself in an Appalachian town so small that it usually doesn’t show up on printed maps. Even Google has a hard time navigating out here. I’ll spare you the details of actually getting there—that would require a season all on its own.

The stories that my team and I follow don’t tend to take us out here, to rural parts of the country. I wouldn’t say that coming out here is a treat, but it is certainly _different._ It’s certainly one of those events that puts things into perspective.

The town is called Takodana. It’s a bastardization of the butchering of a Cherokee word lost to the ages. It’s nestled right on the edge of a hill and during the winter, the sun falls behind its ridges somewhere around three in the afternoon. The air in Takodana is dry and smells like coal and booze. Even though I had rolled into the town in late April, the mercury was unseasonally hovering around ninety degrees.

Maz is called the Mayor of Takodana, though that’s not her official title. She just runs the town’s only watering hole. She’s quite short and wears loose clothes and large glasses. Larson had told me that Maz’s temperament could be jarring, that she would want to know exactly who sent for me before I even took a step into the bar.

What he didn’t tell me was Maz kept a 15 gauge shotgun behind the counter. So, if you’re listening, Larson, thanks for the heads up.

 

_Sarah wasn’t taking this trip alone. Dana was coming because Julie had an emergency at home to take care of._

_Their rented car had barely made it from Lexington all the way through the winding patch of nothing that was this town. They were thirsty. They were hungry. They were tired, and most importantly, they could have used a drink._

_The bar wasn’t much to look at—in all honesty, nothing out here was. The sides were panelled, either painted white or bleached white from the sun, who knew. All the windows were cracked, with bits of tape holding everything together. A tinny country song blared from broken speakers. The main door was wide open, a busted screen the only barrier keeping trespassers and ne’er-do-wells away._

_Seeing as neither Sarah nor Dana were either of those things, Sarah opened the screen door and stepped in._

_Right into the line of fire of a rifle._

_Before she could scream or tell Dana to step back, the small creature guarding the bar adjusted the butt of the rifle and spoke. “Who are you?” she asked. “We don’t take kindly to strangers ’round these parts.”_

_This must have been Maz, Sarah realized._

_“We’re from_ Serial _,” she said quickly. “Larson Tekka sent us.”_

_At that Maz dropped her weapon and released the firing pin. Her face lit up with a grin as she waved them inside. “Why didn’t you say that to start off with? He told me you would be stopping by. Come on in. Shut the door behind you, you’ll let all the flies in.”_

 

Maz took Dana and I to the back of the bar, out of sight from the few patrons who were already there. She offered us some beers, which we gladly took and asked what we wanted to know.

 

 **Sarah Koenig:** We’re looking for a young gentleman by the name of Finn.

 **Maz K.:** Does this Finn have a last name?

 **Sarah Koenig:** I’m afraid we don’t have much else than that. You see, he was an—

 **Maz K.:** There are two hundred and seventy three people who live in Takodana, Miss Koenig, and I know every single one of ’em. We don’t have a _Finn_.

 

I was just about ready to scream. We had come all this way, had searched for all this time, had had a gun pointed in our faces, and she was just going to obfuscate the issue.

And that’s when we met him.

 

_A man approached their table in the back. He had a stained white apron tied around his waist. His white and black checkered shirt was rolled up to his elbows. Though his features were boyish, his temples were grey. But there was something stern and tight in his expression, as though he was trying to uphold a terrible burden. He reminded Sarah all at once of her uncle, who had come back from the war a quiet, hard shell of himself._

_“I’m Finn,” the intruder said._

_Dana’s eyes widened, and Maz’s jaw clenched._

_“We’ve been—oh my goodness—we’ve been looking for you for a_ long _time.”_

_“Boy, you can’t be out here talking to these folks,” Maz snapped at him. “Y-you’ve got a mess in the kitchen to clean.”_

_There was a concern in Maz’s voice that made Sarah’s ears perk up. She jotted something to herself._

_“Maz. It’s fine. Really.” Finn was neither eager to begin this conversation nor was he avoidant. Rather, he simply seemed very tired, like he had been running a marathon for twenty years and suddenly had lost his reasons for putting one foot in front of the other._

_“I suppose you want_ me _to clean it up,” Maz sneered._

_“Maz, it’s Sunday. Takodana is a backwater asshole, but they’re God fearing folk. No one is coming to the bar on Sunday. It can wait.”_

_Maz harrumphed and dismissed herself from the table. Finn took her place. “Miss Koenig. Miss Chevis. It’s nice to meet you both. Big fan of your show.”_

 

Unlike Maz, Finn had no qualms about talking to us. His one stipulation was that we wouldn’t record his voice, make mention about his appearance, or let us use the name he goes by now on-air. He’s not in witness protection or anything. If he was, he wouldn’t be able to talk to us in the first place. But he’s worried. He’s scared. You have to be if you’re not sure where all the pieces landed of a multi-billion dollar company you helped collapse.

 

_Finn wrang his hands together and kept his eye on the screen door. It was mostly Dana asking the questions. She had a lighter touch when it came to extreme cases than Sarah did. And that was fine by Sarah. More than anything, she just wanted to listen, her listenership be damned._

_“How much do you know about the First Order anyway?” he asked._

_“Not much,” Dana said. “It’s like the entire Internet has been scrubbed of their presence, but we know that they were very dangerous.”_

_“Are,” Finn clarified. “Hux’s sentence was only three years and the rest of them are out there somewhere.” There was a waver in his voice, a tinge of unsubtle fear._

_“You’re scared of them?” Sarah asked._

_“Of course I am,” Finn said sharply. “Their connections to the seats of power and wealth in this country go deep. And they weren’t just screwing rich folks out of money. They were into some real violent shit.”_

_Dana cocked her head to the side, and her eyebrows rose. “Larson says you saw some really nasty stuff back then.”_

_“You ever been to war, Miss Chevis?” Finn asked. “That’s a thing you journalists do, right? Go to war?”_

_“My show is_ This American Life _. I’ve never seen combat.” Dana’s expression is blank but forthcoming._

_“I’ll skip the gory details, but I saw a village get mowed down by the First Order security detail.”_

_Sarah stopped writing. “Larson said it was the KS-119 that did the killing.”_

_“Oh no.” Finn shook his head. “It was us. And_ that’s _why I went to the DEA as soon as I got back to New York. I got a kid now, Miss Chevis, Miss Koenig. I_ have _to be scared of the First Order. It keeps them safe.”_

 _The screen door opened with a_ whoosh _and closed with a_ bang _. It drew their attentions to the sound._

_In the threshold stood a rather unremarkable-looking woman. Her brown hair was tied back in a low, floppy bun. Though her clothes were several sizes too large, Sarah could still see that the woman was quite slim. A young girl stood beside her. Her cloud-like hair was the color of honey glistening in the sun. She shared a nose with Finn but had the woman’s bright eyes and a splash of freckles across the bridge of her nose._

_“Rey!” Maz cried from the bar. She sounded happy, if not a bit surprised. “What are you doing here in the middle of the Good Lord’s day?”_

_Rey shrugged. “Alicia and I were just walking around and we wanted to come in and say hello to Dad.” Rey spoke with an accent. Not a country drawl but a refined accent from the halls of Oxford._

_Sarah looked to Finn, then back at Rey. Her eyebrows rose in realization. This new woman, Rey, must be in hiding too._

 

But regardless of any restrictions he put on us, Finn was our first real lead in the case since we got started. He was on the inside. Not for very long, though, but enough to catch a glimpse of the belly of the beast.

 

_Finn waved to the woman, Rey. She looked between Finn and the two outsiders. Her eyes narrowed, and she crossed her arms. She told the girl, Alicia, to go in the back to help Auntie Maz with whatever she needed. The girl went begrudgingly. Rey approached the table. Dana stood to greet and shake Rey’s hand, but Rey sidestepped her. Sarah kept her pen and her notebook out._

_“What is this?” Rey asked Finn._

_“They’re with_ Serial _,” Finn said. “You know. The podcast?”_

_“You have a lot of nerve coming out here,” Rey spat at Sarah, then to Dana. “Do you know what the First Order was?”_

_“Rey—”_

_“No! Don’t ‘Rey’ me, Finn. They are dangerous people. You most of all should know that.” Then she turned to Sarah. “I know you. I’ve seen the news. I’m not talking to you.”_

_“We’re not going to use anything to identify you,” Sarah said. “Your identities are safe with us.”_

_Rey jutted her hip to the side and pursed her lips. “Hardly.”_

_“Does FOI know who you are?” Dana asked._

_“They know it was someone from the inside who led the Feds to them,” Rey answered dryly ._

_“But they don’t know it was_ you _,” Dana said. It wasn’t so much a line of inquiry as it was a line of emphasis._

_“This story is important to us,” Sarah offered. “There’s something shady going on with this group and—”_

_Rey put out a hand. “What makes you think digging around a story buried twenty years ago is going to do anyone any good?”_

_So, it_ was _buried, Sarah thought. She had enough sense not to write this down._

_“Do you think you can bring them to justice?” Rey asked. Her voice went tight and shrill. Her face paled to the color of a spotlight. “They owned half the government before 2000. There is no justice there.”_

_“We were able to get Adnan a second trial,” Sarah said._

_“Who?!”_

 

This is what he told us.

First Order Incorporated had two major operations going at once. Because the millions they were making in securities fraud wasn’t enough money, they had to make a million more in trafficking—that’s my aside, not his.

 

_Finn excused himself from the table and took Rey to the side. They spoke in tones so quiet Sarah could barely hear them._

_“If she doesn’t let him talk,” Dana muttered under her breath, “this story is dead in the water, you know that, right?”_

_“I did not come all the way out here to some godforsaken ghost town for a dead story,” Sarah hissed. “I didn’t almost get shot at between my fucking eyeballs for a dead story.”_

_“At least the beer is good,” Dana said over the rim of her bottle._

_Sarah scoffed, “Says you.”_

_Finn returned, and Rey took their child and left the bar. He apologized and said he was going to have a talk with his wife later that evening._

_“Can you tell us about the board members?” Dana asked._

_“Armitage was a weird guy,” Finn said. “Everyone was on something at the time. They wanted us focused but comfortable. But I’m pretty sure Armitage was dipping into those starkillers himself, because there’s no way he should have had that kind of energy given the_ personality _that he had.”_

 

There were in fact five board members. Hux was the face of the company, though. He was the one on the floor trying to motivate everyone to sell, sell, sell their stocks. Looking back on it, Finn said, the things Hux said were incomprehensible, nonsensical things that only made sense in context (and probably if you were high). The frenetic energy, he told us, that Hux was able to drum up from the callers was extraordinary. There was hollering, hooting, chest thumping, and a palpable feeling that as long as they stayed on-script and on the phone, they could do anything in the world.

That feeling, he said, that invincible, unconquerable feeling was as addictive as the starkillers they were selling on the street.

Next in line was a person Finn only knew by face and by shape. They were really good about only keeping Hux in the spotlight. This other guy, however, was practically in the shadows, away from the media’s watchful and pesky eye. Let’s call him...Ren for now. You’ll see why in a bit. He was tall and built like a refrigerator—Finn’s words, not mine. He either was never on starkillers or was the world’s most functioning addict, because the only way Finn could describe his personality was “dour.” He never looked like he was having half as much fun as the other employees, which was weird because they were always having fun.

“Ever seen _Animal House_?” Finn asked us. “Workdays were a lot like that movie.”

 

 _“And we were always having fun,” Finn said. “Did you ever see_ Animal House?”

_“It’s one of my favorites,” Dana said with a grin._

_“Well, it was a lot like that—frat house shenanigans and a lot, and I mean a lot, of drugs. When we crossed a billion dollars in sales, we had a midget throwing contest. Right in the middle of the bullpen.”_

_“Holy Jesus,” Sarah said._

_“No, no. It’s fine. They were in velcro suits, and we were throwing them onto a velcro dartboard. It was soft.”_

_He said it with such an air of nonchalance that Sarah had to ask him again, to clarify, to really make sure that she was hearing what he was saying._

_“It’s true,” he said flatly. “All of it.”_

 

But if Ren was an unknown variable in the long equation that was First Order Incorporated, then the other three board members weren’t even in the line. They were hardly around the office, but when they were, they were almost exclusively talking or working around Ren. Some of the other employees in the bullpen thought they overheard snippets of their covert conversations. They might have been part of the starkiller production and distribution line, but Finn couldn’t identify them. Either way, they were up to something particularly shady. The employees in the bullpen and in the warehouses had a nickname for them: the Knights of Ren.

Which is a little dramatic for me, but if you’re going to run securities fraud and a drug ring, then you might as well go all out and in style.

 

_“But if you want the honest to God truth,” Finn said, leaning in close as though someone could overhear him in this empty bar. “There was another person.”_

_Sarah’s pen hovered over the page. “On the board?” she asked._

_Finn shook his head. “No. He wasn’t like the rest of the First Order either. We were mostly a young group. I think Hux might have been the oldest at the time. He was 30.”_

_Sarah wrote this down, circled it, and put a question mark next to it. Could a thirty-something really put together something so nefarious? Rather, because he was thirty at its peak, could a twenty-something do it?_

_“This other guy was old. I’m talking Cryptkeeper old. If you asked him about the Pilgrims landing in Massachusettes, he could probably tell you all about it.”_

_Dana snickered._

_“He was kind of small and hunched over his cane. Yeah. He had a cane. It would clink on the linoleum.” Finn snapped his fingers once, twice, three times. “Just like that. It had this heavy sound to it like it was made of iron or something.”_

_“Are you sure this was a person and not a Saturday morning cartoon character?” Sarah asked with a mischievous smile. She noted Finn’s words but wondered if time had diluted the memory with extravagance._

_“I haven’t even got to the best part,” Finn chuckled ._

_“Did he have a white cat and a scar on his eye?” Dana joked. Her tone was playful and airy ._

_“Not on his eye but around his forehead,” Finn said. He put his finger on his forehead, just below the hairline and curled a line down to about his browbone. “It was thick and curled around like this. I have no idea what someone like him was doing with a battle scar like that.”_

_“I’m going to assume that you don’t know his name,” Dana said. Finn shook his head._

_“But that image is striking enough. We might be able to find some kind of string to pull on.”_

_“I doubt it,” Finn said. “He’s got that wall of money and influence that keeps people off his scent. He’s a lot like that Perlmutter guy from Marvel.”_

_Sarah scrunched her face. Dana paused for a second, like she was trying to put a name to a face. She turned to Sarah, who shrugged, and turned back to Finn. “Who?” she asked._

_“The guy who runs Marvel. The one who’s partly responsible for it being so bad with actors of color.”_

_Sarah and Dana looked at each other, then to Finn. Sarah rose an eyebrow. Dana cleared her throat._

_Seeing that his reference had quite thoroughly been missed, Finn sighed and leaned back in his seat. “Look. In case you haven’t noticed, there isn’t a lot to do out here in Takodana. I read a lot of Cracked articles to fill the time.”_

 

Finn also shared with us how people were usually brought into the company. I’m sure most of you are under the assumption that if you are in the finance sector, you have an education in and job experience around the finance sector. Now, this won’t surprise our millennial listeners, but it may cause some disorientation with our boomer crowd. Sometimes, you don’t need any background in the field whatsoever to be picked up by a company. In fact, in many cases, it’s better.

They looked for college kids, for starving artists, for charlatans, even. Anyone who could read a script and who had a hunger for power and cold hard cash.

 

_Finn’s phone buzzed, cutting into the meat of the conversation like a butcher knife. He picked it up, and his face dropped reading the message._

_“That’s Rey. I’ve got to get going,” he said, standing and sliding his phone in his back pocket._

_Sarah and Dana stood as well and thanked him for his time. Finn said that it was nothing and that he would be happy to talk to them again._

_“Listen. This terrifies my wife, and I’m not quite ready to come out of hiding, but people need to know. They gotta. The First Order isn’t done yet.”_

_“We will make sure this gets out to the public,” Sarah said._

_“And we will do everything we can—” Dana started._

_“And then some,” Finn clarified._

_“And then some,” Dana agreed, “to make sure you and your family stay safe.” He shook their hands and trotted to the door. Maz yelled at him about coming back later to help with the food prep tomorrow, and Finn just waved away her comment._

_A thought came to Sarah, and she ran outside behind Finn, who had already slammed the door to his black F-150 shut. “Finn!” she called out. He looked up and rolled down the window._

_“Can you tell me about your wife? Why is she so afraid of the First Order?”_

_Finn pressed his lips together. He looked over his shoulder, then in front, in case Rey materialized within earshot. “It’s not really my place to talk about it. But before she got to know me, she was with one of the guys.”_

_“In the company?” Sarah pursed her lips. That didn’t sound so bad._

_“No. On the board.”_

_Sarah took a step back and sputtered, “Oh my goodness. Is she…Finn, you_ have _to get her to talk to us.”_

_Finn revved up the car and put it in gear. “That, I’m afraid, is going to be impossible. We’ve been married now for almost fifteen years, and she still won’t tell me the name of the guy.”_

_“Jesus.”_

_“I know. He…listen. He took something from her. It took her a long time to trust people again after the company fell, you know.”_

_Sarah nodded._

_“I gotta get outta here,” Finn said as he pulled the car into reverse._

_“Thanks again, Finn,” Sarah said as he rolled away. Finn stuck his arm out the window and waved in acknowledgement. Dust kicked up from the wheels, and the sun glared against the roof. Once the truck reached the end of the gravel driveway, he sped up and drove away._

_Dana had appeared by Sarah’s side in the interim. She held their bags in one hand and kept her other hand over her eyes, blocking the sun._

_“We need to talk to Rey,” Sarah said as the dust settled around them._

_“Yes indeedy, boss,” Dana responded._

_They watched Finn’s car disappear into the distance. Behind them, they heard Maz call to them, demanding that they pay for their beers._

_“Yes we do.”_

 

Sometimes, you came to the First Order. That’s what Finn did. He was fresh out of a few courses at community college, working the stock line at a grocery store, and living in a musty apartment in Queens. He saw an ad for a job offering a promising career in finance for those willing to put their nose to the grindstone. He responded with a cover letter and resume, and in two weeks, he was called into headquarters and had his interview with the woman who would go on to be his trainer. She was such a tightass for memorizing all parts of the script that the guys in his cohort called her Captain. Captain Phasma. Because she was like a ghost—always watching, but never seen.

And sometimes…the First Order came to you.

 

_Sarah and Dana had no plans of returning to Takodana. Their original plan, which had solidified as they pulled into the town and witnessed its remoteness firsthand, was to stay at the Best Western in Winchester and just have Finn meet them there. But Finn made it clear to them that he wasn’t leaving. So, if they wanted more information about the drug running scheme, they were going to have to come back._

_Somehow, despite it only being April, it was even hotter that day than it was the previous. A sweltering ninety-five degrees and steadily climbing. The bar’s air conditioner was broken, so a white, rotating fan whirred in the corner while all the windows were blown open. It was so hot that even Maz couldn’t fire a sarcastic quip at the city slicker journalists as they entered the bar._

_It was as empty today as it was yesterday. Maz had nodded off with a terry towel in one hand and a chipped glass in the other._

_Finn met them in the back again. Dana pulled up a third chair and sat at the head of the table, while Sarah and Finn sat on opposite sides of the booth. Sarah pulled out her notebook, clicked her pen, and asked Finn about the starkillers._

_“Wait!” cried a voice from outside._

_Finn creased his brows in confusion. “Rey?” he shouted at the figure rapidly approaching the front door. The screen clanged behind her, which rocked Maz from her slumber._

_Rey leaned over the bar and panted. Her face was so red that it made the freckles that dotted her nose and cheeks that much more prominent. Sweat had collected in a v-shape from her tank top’s collar to its bottom. The back of her shirt fared the same. She gasped for water._

_Finn bolted to his feet and into the back kitchen._

_Slowly, Sarah and Dana stood. It was horrible to think it, Sarah knew, but something told her that Rey had come to talk. Her stomach flipped in anticipation._

_Finn returned with a bag of ice and a water bottle, already condensating. She took the ice bag and placed it on her forehead. She drank greedily from the bottle—all sixteen ounces in one go. Finn got her another one._

_“Did you run all the way here from the school?” Finn asked. Rey glanced at him, then looked away. She nodded as she finished her second bottle. “It’s a million degrees out there!”_

_“I know,” Rey said. She gave him her second empty bottle and asked for a third._

_“But why—”_

_“_ Because _, Finn…”_

_And from there, the two former First Order employees spoke in hushed tones to each other. Sarah looked to Dana, who was biting her lip._

_“What do you think?” Sarah asked._

_“She’s the key to the rest of this story breaking right open,” Dana responded._

_“But do you think she’s going to? She was so furious yesterday.”_

_They couldn’t hear what either Finn or Rey were saying, but the latter had crossed her arms and leaned in at the waist, making herself small. Her eyes were wide, and her tone was frantic, from what they could tell._

_“She’s still pretty pissed,” Dana said._

_“Well, let’s just hope Informant FN-2187 also happens to be a miracle worker.”_

_Rey ran her hand through her hair and along the sides of her face. She must have asked for another bottle of water, because Finn disappeared into the back again. Sarah glanced at Dana, but they did not move from their place. They held their breath. They waited._

_Finn returned with the bottle and offered it to Rey. She grabbed it, took a swig, and looked Sarah right in the eye. Her point-blank stare was cold, hardened, almost deadly, like that of a sniper._

_“Are you the journalist?” she asked._

_Sarah nodded. “I am. And so is Dana—”_

_Rey held up her hand. “I will talk to only one of you.”_

_Sarah tried to contain her delight, but the sigh that escaped her still sounded relieved. “We really appreciate you doing this for us, Rey,” she said. “We know this—”_

_“Don’t say anything. If you say something, I’m going to change my mind. I’m going to get Maz to drive you out of this bar, and I never want to see your faces in this town again. Do you understand?”_

_Sarah nodded. “Do you want your husband to join us?” she asked._

_Rey shook her head. The sternness in her eyes faded into weariness. She sighed, and quite suddenly she looked very, very old. Sarah guessed Rey’s age to be somewhere in her mid-40s, just a few years younger than she herself was._

_“I talked to him about it last night. I…I don’t think I could go through it again with him,” she murmured, her tone laced with regret._

_She glanced over at Finn, who was settling in with Dana. He offered her a small but understanding smile._

_“Let’s sit here then,” Sarah offered. Rey didn’t need to be told twice. She pulled herself onto the barstool. Its upholstery was cracking; the fluff was spilling out. The metal creaked under her weight, though Rey was a small woman._

_When Sarah sat, her chair moaned._

_“Before we get started,” Sarah said. She opened her satchel and pulled out a document. “I need you to sign this.”_

 

Each person we talk to who seeks to remain anonymous and hidden from the spotlight is protected. Even those who are okay with us releasing their names, descriptions, and voices have to sign this document. We don’t have a Human Studies Review Board for journalism, but we do have something very close. The ethics of our field require us to uphold an interviewee’s desire for anonymity to a _T._ Our professions are based on our reputation and on our honor. If we lose that, we lose everything.

I tell you this because the story that I’m about to tell you will sound very vague. Its vagueness may make you think that I’ve cooked up the story by haphazardly cobbling together some movies on the subject of Wall Street corruption. But I assure you, this story is real. I have to keep my distance from the story and tell it in the broadest of strokes. If I reveal too much, I could be endangering my source’s life.

So, for this segment, I will be referring to them as Source 1.

 

_Rey capped the pen and returned it to Sarah. Sarah slid the legal document into her satchel. She opened her notepad, but Rey shook her head._

_“Please don’t write this down either.”_

_This was the first time Sarah had received such a request. Two thoughts came to her simultaneously. One, it would be rather difficult to go back in October, when she did the write up for the show, to remember everything. And two, this must be some dangerous stuff she was about to listen to._

_A third thought came to her as Rey licked her lips and wrung her hands and fretted over exactly where to start. Sarah wished she was back in Chicago with Rey, where the poor girl could get some decent alcohol to ease the telling of this story._

_“I was nineteen years old when I was brought on with the First Order,” Rey began._

 

Source 1 tells me that they were an orphan, dropped off on a stoop, abandoned to the wills of the world. I wish I could report to you that theirs was a made-for-TV story, where the family at the other end of the door was elderly, kind and had always wanted children. But, as so often is the case, real life is Hollywood’s diametric opposite.

The person who raised Source 1 was cruel. They would keep Source 1 locked in the house. They would withhold food from the child. When Source 1 was old enough, the person who raised them got them started in the family business. As a child, Source 1 was small and could wiggle their way into places grown adults simply couldn’t.

 

_“What was the family business?” Sarah asked._

_“Cars,” Rey said. “We were a car repair shop, but a lot of times, we would mess around and tamper with the car itself so they would have to come back and see us. A lot of times, the things we scavenged off the car, we would turn around on the black market.”_

_“You say ‘we,’” Sarah prodded. “Was there more than just you at the shop?”_

_“No. It was just me and Uncle Pl—” Rey stopped. Her whole face turned red, from her hairline down to her chin. She gulped down the rest of her drink and set the bottle down with a plastic_ thump _. “Christ. I’m sorry,” she hastily apologized, her voice quivering._

_“Take your time,” Sarah said with a concerned nod._

_“It was just me and Plutt,” Rey said. “But you know, I was good at my job. By the time I was fifteen, I could strip down a Thunderbird, clean it, and reassemble it in in under five hours. Give me a busted, broken, useless American car manufactured after 1963, and I could raise the dead.”_

_Sarah grinned. “Could you take a look at our rental then? Something’s been rattling under the hood since we got here.”_

_Rey twisted around and looked out the screen door. She shook her head. “It’s a Toyota. I never got a chance to venture outside of the domestic market.”_

_Not saying anything more, Rey peeled the label off the bottle. Sarah turned and looked outside. A flag posted across the street hung limp on its pole. The cloudless sky was a pale blue, as if the sun had bleached that as well. It was even too hot for the bugs; not a single fly buzzed or stirred in the scorching air. Other than Maz’s soft snores and Dana and Finn’s hushed conversation, the bar, the world even, was silent._

_“But, you know,” Rey started again. Sarah perked in her direction. “Even if it wasn’t a Japanese car, I wouldn’t be able to tinker with it. We…”_

_“You and Plutt?”_

_Rey shook her head. “I stopped tinkering with them after I joined First Order. But, we met because his car broke down.”_

_Even though this happened years ago, Rey said it with such cadence and tone that Sarah could tell that this scar was still tender._

_“Finn?” Sarah tried._

_Rey shook her head again. “No. But God Almighty do I wish. I would have saved myself so much time, energy, and heartbreak if I had just met Finn right off the bat.”_

_Sarah nodded. The fact that just about every woman she had ever talked to said the same refrain made her incredibly sad._

_“We came out here together,” Rey said. “He and I. You know.”_

_“He does love you very much, Rey,” Sarah said, though her words felt hollow and impotent. “You’re a very lucky woman.”_

_“I know that,” Rey said. She rolled the bottom of the bottle in circles on the bar table. “You know the weirdest thing is that to this day, I’m not one hundred percent sure that he didn’t care at least a little bit about me.”_

_“Who?”_

_“Kyle. Kyle Lauren.”_

_Realization hit her so hard that Sarah doubled back, her mind dizzy from the shock. The Knights of_ Ren. _Kyle Lau-_ Ren.

_Rey must have seen two and two come together for her, because she nodded slowly in confirmation._

_“He was on the board,” she said. “Despicable man, really. He didn’t care about how many laws he was breaking, only how deep his pockets could be lined.”_

 

Someone from First Order Inc. found something in Source 1—some innate talent that could be trained, honed, and refined. From solid stone, that person would shape Source 1 in their own image.

 

_It was the dead middle of winter. The sun crept up just after eight, only to flee the scene promptly at four. Cold winds ripped across the Delaware River, bringing with it all the despair of Philadelphia. Snow lined the sidewalks in mounds larger than some children. Ice blotted the streets like fresh black ink._

_Which is probably what prompted the black Chevy Lumina missing a corner of its fender to roll into their shop that fateful Tuesday afternoon. Rey wiped her black-stained hands with a rag, stuffed it in her back pocket and approached the car with tentative steps._

_A man exited the vehicle, framed by the glow cast by humming halogen streetlights._

_He was tall and broad shouldered, and black tousled curls framed his angled face. He was stunning, but less like a Hollywood star and more like a painting. His was a beauty that had to be taken in with small glances and appreciated. Rey couldn’t differentiate between a cheap suit and an expensive one, but his fancy car and the gold Rolex on his wrist told her all she needed to. He was a very rich man and if Rey knew anything of this world, it was that very rich men held something more important than gold bars; they held power and influence._

_The man looked at her and she stopped, as though she had been shocked, and, in retrospect, perhaps she had. His eyes were a perplexing hue—not quite completely green and not quite completely brown. His gaze, not cold, but certainly not kindly or welcoming either. It was as though he were just as curious about her as she was of him: a bear meeting a hare for the first time. Her stomach flopped and her hands twitched._

_Rey wanted to step forward, to know more about the man and the strange world of privilege he inhabited, but shame weighed her feet._

_Her own attire had been stolen from a Goodwill bin—a pair of men’s overalls and a faded purple puffy jacket with a tear along the arm. Her own physicality was no more complex than a glass of water: a simple girl from simple circumstances. She didn’t have the funds, the right to stand in this man’s shadow._

_She cast her eyes to the ground._

_“Can you fix this?” he asked. His tenor was as rich as honey and Rey was drawn to it like a bee; she looked up, first at his eyes, then at his mouth._

_His mouth was a little too big for his face, but his lips were full—most assuredly warm and soft. Rey pressed her own lips together as a spark ran through her belly. Her cheeks prickled. She had only been kissed once: a boy named Reese kissed her with chapped lips and he slid his hand up her shirt with clumsy, fidgety hands. It had been behind the chop shop and he smelled just as much as motor oil and grime as she did._

_The man gestured to the damaged fender impatiently._

_Rey was about to answer him, when a low rumble of a voice cut her off. It was Plutt, lumbering in from the adjacent office. He was a large beast of a man with grimy, sweaty hands and beady eyes. He constantly smelled like stale booze and rotting cheese, and Rey’s stomach rolled as his cloud of stink wafted behind him._

_“Who are you?” the rich man asked._

_“Name’s Plutt. I’m the owner of this garage,” Plutt said, adjusting the waistband of his pants over his grotesque gut. He offered his hand to the man in greeting. The man did not take it. He did, however, curl his lip ever so slightly and that gave Rey enough reason to smile._

_Plutt and the man discussed the nature of the damage. Plutt hunkered onto his haunches and looked at the broken light._

_“I need this operational as soon as possible,” the man said tersely._

_Plutt coughed, low and phlegmy. He brought himself to his feet, sniffed, and rocked a bit on his heel. “If we didn’t have to call in any parts and it was just a matter of fixing the light, I could have it out to you by tonight, but as it is…you’re looking at a week’s time at least.”_

_The only change in the man’s demeanor was the slight twitch in the corner of his mouth. His gaze was as cold as the snow and as hard as steel. There was a maelstrom brewing inside, threatening to burst out. Plutt couldn’t see it, but Rey certainly could._

_“We might not need to order parts,” Rey piped up. She fell under the man’s icy glare and felt a shiver run down her spine. She bit her bottom lip._

_“What are you going on about, girl?” Plutt asked roughly._

_“I can do it. I’ve been working on Chevys for the last eighteen months. I know them in and out, frontwards and back. My hands are small and quick. And I can assure you that no one else in your financial firm will know the difference.”_

_The man squared off in her direction. His expression had softened slightly, his austerity melting into curiosity. He was, it seemed, intrigued by her, and that made Rey giddy for some reason. “You can guarantee all of that?”_

_She nodded. “All of it. In three days.”_

_“What’s your price?”_

_Rey was about to give him a figure, when Plutt stepped between them. “Thirteen hundred, and not a penny less.”_

_The man balked at the price._

_“That shouldn’t be difficult for you, mate,” Plutt said with a grin that made Rey’s skin crawl. He nodded toward the man’s watch._

_The man followed his gaze and clicked the roof of his mouth. “Just because I wear a Rolex doesn’t mean I’m amenable to being ripped off.”_

_Plutt’s whole demeanor hardened. It wasn’t often that they had customers like this rich man, who dressed in fine clothes and knew more things than Plutt. Rey knew this and what amenable meant. She snickered._

_The man looked to her again and Rey’s cheeks warmed. She thought she had been quieter than that. The man’s expression was something close to amusement and he said to Plutt, “Thirteen hundred and not a penny more or I’ll sue you for every scrap of steel and every drop of stolen copper in here.”_

_Plutt sputtered his response, but the man would hear nothing of it._

_“You will have the girl tend to my car as well.”_

_Rey frowned and pinched her brows in consternation. She stepped around Plutt and snapped, “My name is Rey. Not Girl.”_

_The man turned slightly to face her. He raised his eyebrows in shock, but the uptick in his lips betrayed his amusement. Rey felt her cheeks warm._

_“Why?” Plutt growled._

_The man turned his attention Plutt, and as plainly as if he were explaining the color of the sky, he said, “I trust her.”_

 

 **Finn:** The thing about the First Order was that they wanted empty vessels. They wanted people who didn’t know any better. My direct supervisor was a broke, single mother before Hux saw something special in her.

_(sigh)_

I guess that’s the thing too. They made us feel good. Made us feel like we were champions, untouchable by the laws or God. Hell, if you have enough starkillers floating in your system, you think you can defy the laws of physics. You think you can fly.

 

Source 1 says that over the course of a few days, the person from First Order—I’ll call them Recruiter—found favor with Source 1. In just three days, Source 1 was plucked from their squalor in the slums and planted in the luxury of a Park Avenue apartment and a Wall Street office.

 

_The man came by the shop with frequency and Rey had come to learn that his name was Kyle Lauren._

_The day this had happened, Rey was rolled under the car with a lamp burning bright and warm as the sun next to her. Nimble fingers jumped around the vehicle’s innards, ensuring that the damage had only extended to the headlight and fender. She had knocked into the lamp and between her swearing and its clattering against the cement, Rey couldn’t be entirely sure she had heard correctly._

_“Are you ok?” the man asked._

_Rey winced and shook her hand. She rolled out from under the car. “Peachy. What did you say your name was?”_

_“Kyle. Kyle Lauren.”_

_Rey paused for a breath. Something else must have fallen and struck her head because that_ could not _be the man’s name._

_“You find something wrong with it.” His statement was less of a question and more of a declaration of fact._

_Rey snorted and rolled back under the car._

_“That’s not your real name.”_

_As she looked around and saw nothing the matter with his car, she played the syllables in her mind again and again, like a tape recording. It made her smile and that smile became a giggle, which grew into full-bellied laugh._

_The man—_ Kyle _—clipped his heel on her board and pulled her from out of the car. His expression was stern and impertinent. It would have frightened her if she hadn’t realized the tips of his ears were as scarlet as a Christmas ornament. Her laugh racked her ribs._

 _“_ What _is the matter with my_ name _?” Kyle seethed through his teeth._

_It took Rey a moment or two in order to collect herself. She only broke into giggles once more after that._

_Kyle groaned and rolled his eyes._

_“Mister,” Rey chuckled, “my birth parents left me on the doorstep of an asshole who doesn’t feed me every 24 hours and even_ they _weren’t cruel enough to saddle me with a name like that. Try again. What’s your real name?”_

_But Kyle’s expression had fallen into something unrecognizable._

_“What?” Rey asked._

_“He doesn’t feed you?”_

_Rey scoffed and rolled her eyes. She reached for the fender and pulled herself back under it. “When I was a kid, yeah. But now I’m old enough and quick enough for scavenge for myself.”_

_He didn’t say anything then. Rey thought she heard shuffling, as though he was adjusting the sleeve of his Armani suit. She had learned that it was Armani last week. He had worn Versace that first fateful evening._

_She could_ feel _the angst radiating off of him. She grumbled and slid out again. She propped herself on her elbows to get a better look at his distraught face. The way the light fell upon his sharp (but somehow delicate) features made her stomach flutter. His eyes, in this light, seemed a reflective light brown, like that of Plutt’s whiskey._

_“What on earth is bothering you?” she asked with an edge of incredulity._

_Kyle crossed his arms and turned from her. With an exasperated sigh, he ran his hand through his dark hair._

_“What?” she tried again._

_He looked at her. The intensity of his gaze reminded her of news reels of fires ravaging the Rockies—beautiful, but incredibly, unquestionably dangerous._

_Something sparked between her legs and Rey took in a sharp breath as she pressed her knees together. She swallowed against the lump in her throat, hoping that Kyle hadn’t noticed the room’s change in the air pressure._

_He hadn’t. Rey sighed in relief and pulled herself back under the car, even though there was nothing left to explore._

_“It isn’t right,” he muttered._

 

_***_

 

_People, Rey had long since surmised, were like cars—pop the hood and all the coils and pipes look intimidating. But really, getting people to do what you wanted to do was as simple as knowing how to read an oil gauge._

_“Listen to me, Tammy,” Rey said. The brunette woman whom she was haggling crossed her arms and sighed._

_For instance, people tend to respond better to persuasion when their names are used. Friends addressed each other by name; friends listened to each other._

_“Your car is marvelous,” Rey continued. “Wonderful. It rides like an honest to God dream.”_

_The brunette, Tammy, pursed her lips and jutted her hip to the side. “Well, you’re dreaming if you think I’m going to pay more than a hundred dollars for a new carburetor.”_

_Rey gestured to the car, a 1996 Buick Roadmaster. The red paint around the wood paneling had started to chip and rust. “You can go down the street to those jerks at Meinikin and only one thing is going to happen there, I promise.”_

_“What’s that?”_

_“They’re going to do twice the damage to make sure you come back. They’re going to pocket four times the profit over months from you because you weren’t willing to spend a little extra for reassurances.”_

_“You’re asking me for almost a hundred and fifty dollars for a goddamn carburetor.”_

_Rey shrugged with great exaggeration. “And what is a fifty percent markup for security? Listen, Tammy. I’m not an asshole for Meinikin.”_

_“No. You’re just an asshole.”_

_Rey conceded the point. “I am. But I’m an asshole you can trust.”_

_Tammy looked at her car, then to Rey. Disbelief was as apparent on her expression as the wrinkles around her eyes and frown. The woman groaned._

_“I just. I just can’t. I’ll drive up to Sears to get this looked at.”_

_“But Sears is fifty miles away! You’ll break down before you get up there!”_

_Tammy didn’t say anything more and made her way back to the car. As she fished out her keys, Rey protested, pulling out each and every trick she had learned on the floor of Unkar’s chop shop to get her to stop. Tammy threw up her arm, dismissing Rey’s voice._

_She drove off while Rey ran into the icy street, calling for the cheapskate to come back._

_As the sounds of a rumbling engine died into the evening, Rey heard a slow cadence of clapping emerging from the garage. She turned on her heel and caught herself before she slipped._

_“Kyle Lauren” emerged from the shadows and her stomach flopped as if she had fallen. Even with the dimming light, she could make out his sharp lines, his sarcastic sneer. He was as enigmatic as a fire and something needled in the back of her mind—just as dangerous._

_“What do you want?” Rey spat, hoping the ire in her voice would mask her nervousness._

_“To continue watching performances like that.” He gestured down the road where Tammy’s car disappeared and sauntered his way into the street, closing the distance between them._

_Rey crossed her arms and scowled. He chuckled at that. “You could be great,” he said, “you just need a teacher.”_

_It sounded like a proposal._

_Rey licked her chapped lips. Her eyes grazed Kyle Lauren’s frame, draped in Versace and Ford and Rolex. She caught his eyes, a deep whiskey color in the setting sun. There was a cold kind of cruelty in his look, but the cruelty that seemed to accompany bold ambition._

_Rey didn’t know this man in any real capacity. But she knew, deeply and instinctively, that he would not hurt her._

_She offered her hand to him. He took it. His palm was warm and rough and she wondered what other kinds of work he had done._

_“Let’s begin, shall we?”_

 

_***_

 

_Slowly, his world unfolded before her, like a rose blooming in spring._

_He taught her more than just how to needle and pull people into doing what she wanted them to do. He taught her how to tell someone to go to hell, and make them enjoy every step it would take to get there._

_He taught her how to tell the difference between Coach and Versace, how to spot a knock-off from half a block away. He introduced her to a woman the boys on the floor called Captain Phasma. Kyle just introduced her as Faz. She was as tall as Kyle and spoke with a smooth English accent, like her own, but somehow it seemed more refined coming from a throat draped in twenty-four carat gold._

_Faz taught her how to walk in six inch Louboutins. She taught her how to dress for her shape and how to apply eyeliner and lipstick. But most importantly, Faz taught Rey how to walk into a room full of men, who sat around their conference tables like tigers waiting to pounce, and push them back into their corner: all with a glare. All with a single smirk._

_Rey also did her fair share of teaching. She taught Kyle how to laugh and how to shoot rail vodka until their bodies went numb. She taught him how to speak earnestly, which he did, between said shots and between kisses they had taught each other how to give._

 

Source 1 began working as sort of an apprentice to Recruiter. Recruiter taught them the script and the rules, though there was only one that Source 1 needed to keep in mind.

 _Don’t hang up the phone_.

According to them, Hux used to scream it at them every Monday morning during his motivational meetings. The phone, he said, was the most important invention of the twenty-first century because it made their jobs possible. It was the core of their power. Without it, we couldn’t make the sun rise each and every morning.

As long as the client was on the phone, Source 1 tells me, and as long as the broker talked, a wager could be struck. The entire process was kind of like digging into a mine of fool’s gold. You wore them down, they say. You wore them down with irresistible promises of growing riches and sustained status until they caved in to the temptation. Nobody wants to be that guy who said no to the Pixar stock in 1989. I should know. Because I was that guy who said no to the Pixar stock in 1989 and trust me, I regret it almost every day.

Source 1 had a particular talent for making people feel at ease. They made people trust them with just a simple hello and a gentle smile. They had a magnetic personality that shone through even on the phone, a comforting voice that repeatedly assured , “I will take care of you. Your fortune and your future are safe with me.”

 

 _Rey twirled her manicured finger around the phone’s chord. A scarlet smile cut across her face, made up and glowing with a cocktail of serums, oils, and creams. Her eyes were smoked in gold and chocolate brown. “No, thank_ you _for your business today, Ms. Tahno. You have a good afternoon, you hear me? Bye bye now.”_

_Rey returned the phone to its receiver, and her bracelets rattled. She leaned back in her seat and pursed her lips. The end of the quarter wasn’t for another few days, so she still had time to get the five thousand dollar bonus she’d been encouraged to aim for. She probably could have pulled another thousand dollars on her last call if she’d tried a little harder, but she was in a constant struggle with low-level distraction these last few days._

_She closed her eyes for a second and descended self-indulgently into fantasy. Salt-laced wind rustled through her hair as a slick, white yacht punched through the choppy seas. The vodka in her hand was ice cold. A hot arm snaked around her waist. A hand trailed down her hip and around the curve of her ass and settled there possessively._

_“And how are we doing today, Miss Rey?” a voice murmured from beside her. She jumped back out of her reverie, and her bracelets rang like bells. It was Kyle, leaning over her, propped up by her desk. He smelled like spice and sandalwood and, suspiciously, like the ocean._

_“I’m doing fine, thank you, Mr. Lauren,” she breathed. He was six-three, almost two hundred pounds of straight muscle; his body always radiated with heat that made her head swim._

_He nuzzled close to her. “I believe you’re wanted in the conference room for a meeting, Miss Rey.”_

_She leaned back into him. Their cheeks practically touched; her smile was wicked. “Am I now?”_

_“You’re exactly—” he glanced down at his Rolex— “ten minutes late. We’ll have to do something about that to rectify your behavior.” His already-low voice was edged in a growl and Rey’s skin was practically humming._

_“...I understand, Mr Lauren,” she croaked turning to face him. There was only a breath’s distance between the tips of their noses. Something deep in her belly turned at his gaze; she crossed her legs at the knee and leaned back into the corner of her chair. He inched closer, filling the space._

_She bit her bottom lip and quirked her eyebrow, hoping to coax acknowledgement of their joke from him. His expression did not soften, in fact it seemed to harden further, and Rey wondered if she was ever going to get used to his intensity. Her belly dropped as though she were standing on a precipice atop the Empire State Building. In his eyes, she felt the pull of gravity, the thrill of wild abandon._

_He was angled such that had anyone walked by her desk, they would not have seen his hand tracing little circles on the inside of her exposed, bare thigh. His hand disappeared under the hem of her skirt and a spark ignited between her legs. She hitched her breath as his fingers graced the edge of her panties._

_He set his jaw and uttered, “Meet me in five.”_

_There was only one place they ever “met in five.” So, after Kyle pulled away and walked out, adjusting his tie, Rey waited. She pulled her log of calls close to her face to hide her burning cheeks. Over the top of it, she watched Kyle stride into the hallway and disappear around the corner—a living sculpture with long and powerful legs, a tight ass, and brisk determination._

_She found herself chewing her lip while she waited another ninety seconds. Once those ninety seconds ticked away, she followed him to his dark corner, and he devoured her._

 

But to Source 1, what mattered more than the trust of their clients was the trust of Recruiter. They tell me they were a formidable team together in the office and out, where they languished in the hedonism of everything. For Recruiter, their high life was as familiar to them as going to the grocery store is for us. They started their day with a snort of coke the way everyday folks start off with a cup of coffee.

But for Source 1, this lifestyle had the shiny veneer of something new, something so incredibly different from their former life in poverty.

But the highs from the starkillers weren’t forever either. In fact, the lows brought on by coming down from starkillers were actually what gave it its nickname. Here’s Finn again.

 

 **Finn:** The crash was the worst part about those things. I only took the stuff twice, but man. It sends you to some deep, dark parts of your psyche, I’ll tell you that much. It’s like… _schwoop_. Every happy thought or memory you’ve ever had is just gone. Rushes outta you like a deflating balloon. You can’t even remember what the sun feels like on your skin, and that’s partly because of the light sensitivity that comes with it.

_(pause)_

Sometimes you hallucinate. I did, both times. What I saw almost made me jump off the roof we were all fucking around on. There were a couple of people, not that night though, but later, who did. Suicide is like the fourth most common coming-down symptom.

 **Sarah Koenig:** What did you see?

 **Finn:** The end of the world.

 

Coming out of the First Order, with all that money and prestige, was going to be just as painful.

 

_Rey had stopped drinking, and both bottles had lost their labels. She fiddled with the torn and crumpled remains of those labels._

_“But you eventually got sick of all of it,” Sarah said. Rey nodded to confirm._

_“Not for a long time, though,” Rey said. “There were several times when I would take the heaps of money we had and just roll around in the bills, stark naked like in the movies.” She took a deep breath and her eyelids shut, almost like she was remembering the smell of crisp hundred dollar bills._

_Sarah could only imagine what that must have been like. She had held a wad of crisp hundred dollar bills once and just_ that _was enthralling enough._

_Rey turned in her bar stool to face Sarah. Here, in this light, it was easy to see that Rey was still quite young. Both she and Finn were. Sarah knit her brow in concern._

_“Things were strange at the FOI,” Rey said. “It was like being on another planet. Things that were reasonable and logical in there were utter nonsense out here. It was easy to look down the rabbit’s hole and just…” she gestured, like she was lobbing something into the air. “Lose yourself.”_

 

For Source 1, their moment of clarity came just before the FBI closed in on the company. It was after a party, they said. Now, the First Order threw many parties. In fact, you could just assume that if the First Order themselves weren’t throwing the party, someone from the sales team was. There was _always_ something going on.

But this one stands out for Source 1 because it was when the veneer of the wealth, and the power, and the status finally began chipping away. Reality had slipped in through the cracks, and it didn’t take long for the whole thing to shatter.

Source 1 was incredibly lucky in that way.

 

_The whole club, rafters and all, seemed to sway with the music. A mass of sweaty, scantily-clad, and dayglo-painted bodies writhed against each other to some semblance of a beat. The room turned from blue to green to red to orange, and lasers cut across the smoke billowing from a machine up above. Raucous laughter filled the joint, and the air of goodwill was thick with streaming alcohol and burning starkillers._

_Rey snaked her way through the crowd. Jason, who worked in the bullpen with her, caught her attention by wildly flailing about. She smiled to him and waved. When he wasn’t desperately trying to get in her pants, he could be quite charming. A small part of her almost wanted to stay. Based on his profuse sweating and pinpoint-sized pupils, it was obvious that Jason was as high as the Goodyear blimp. That would make toying with him a little fun, but she had a much more engaging evening waiting for her upstairs in the VIP room._

_The kind of money Jason had working the floor with her was fine and all. It could buy Park Avenue apartments and shiny new cars. But the money Kyle and the board of First Order possessed could buy influence. It could buy fame and prestige. It could buy power. Rey knew where she needed to be._

_The heels of her five inch stiletto Louboutins hardly made a sound as she climbed up the stairs._

_It was only slightly quieter in the room. The bass of the music was muffled by the padding in the walls, but there was a storm of a good time in here. They had their own music, something heartstopping from Europe. A table had overturned, probably the work of one of Ren’s knights. Several vodka bottles had shattered. Bowls of weed rather than starkillers burned in here, but on the glass tabletop were small ziplock bags of cocaine, ready to go._

_When she entered the room, the men hollered and hooted, none louder than Armitage Hux himself. She must have been the first pair of breasts in here all night. A sly smirk crossed her lips to accept their cheers as she sighed and let the straps of her dress slip off her shoulders; the neckline fell an inch or two as well._

_The cheering intensified, their want for her as intoxicating as the starkillers outside._

_Kyle’s expression was that of cold, insatiable hunger. He was smoking a regular tobacco cigarette that night; he took a drag of that but never let his gaze wander from hers._

_The other board members wanted her, but Kyle_ needed _her._

_She showed them a flash of her thigh. More cheers. More laughter. Her heart pounded at the thrill._

_Hux waved her over. When she came near, he wound his arm around her waist and pulled her into his lap. She laughed, exhilarated and light-headed._

_“A delightful bird you’ve found, Mr. Lauren,” Hux chuckled heartily , burying his face in the crook of her neck and breathing in her perfume. Chanel Number 7. “You really ought to pat yourself on the back here.”_

_Kyle took another drag from his cigarette._

_Sweat rolled down the back of Rey’s neck . Her skin smoldered like wildfire. In one fell swoop, Hux guided Rey onto the glass tabletop and reached for the small bag of cocaine resting on the corner._

_Her dress had a small peekaboo cutout over her midriff. She gave the seams a good tug to make the cutout bigger. It was only a four hundred dollar dress. It was replaceable._

_“You know what, no. If we’re going to blow off of a hot babe, we’re going to do it right,” Hux said._

_Not only did Rey workout seven days a week for three hours straight, she was also a fair and lean almost twenty-year-old. Her body was a goddamn masterpiece. She had no qualms about stripping._

_She pulled herself up and off the table and teased herself out of her dress, targeting her gaze on Kyle the entire time. She’d grown so used to his intensity that she didn’t even balk; she was as much a blazing star as he was._

_When she kicked off her dress, Rey stood before a crowd of hollering men in their thirties, wearing nothing more than knee-high stockings, a bralette, and a thong hand-stitched in Italy._

_“I think Hux wants the first line of the night,” she purred, grabbing the CEO’s tie and pulling him, seductively, towards her. He gently brought her back to the table and poured out a line across her tight belly. He snorted that. Then each of the Knights took their turn. And after much prodding, Kyle finally snubbed out his cigarette and took his line off her, too._

_Before the rocks hit, Kyle cupped her face. The way he combed his fingers through her hair made Rey want to take a line for herself, so that this electrifying rush of adrenaline could be even more intensified._

_“My creation,” he whispered before kissing her temple. “You are magnificent. I’ve made you in my image, and you have exceeded expectations.” He kissed her then, full and on the lips. Cheers followed from the board, and under normal circumstances, Rey’s body would be cheering right there with them._

_But something had changed in the air._

 

Source 1 tells me that they had come to realize that night that they _hadn’t_ won favor with the Recruiter. They tell me that it had taken some time, but it had finally sunk in that the Recruiter saw them as nothing more than an experiment. A folly. A fascination. At that moment, Source 1 realized the power they had in their hands was nothing more than a facade. That’s when the high ended and the hard work of crawling out of that pit of decadence and twisted pleasure really began.

Dana and I left Takodana and drove straight to Lexington. We were quiet the entire way. We didn’t even turn the radio on.

Our line of work requires us to seek difficult answers from difficult places. It’s never easy to hear such painful stories of heartbreak and shame. All we could do was hope. Hope that our telling of this story could bring some peace to them and justice for their perpetrators.

We’re coming in to the end of our first episode, so I want to wrap this up quickly.

After a few days, we called Poe about the status on the archive files. He told us he was having a hard time finding someone to help him out back in Quantico. I remembered what Finn had said—that the story had been buried. And I remembered Poe’s and Larson Tekka’s shared phrase. I was beginning to wonder.

While we waited, Dana and I began to scour for more on our new known player, Kyle Lauren. Except, shock of shocks, we were having a difficult time finding anything on the man who even remotely matched Finn’s description of him. There was, apparently, an old accidents claim lawyer out in Indiana by the name of Kyle Lauren, though.

This case had already thrown us out of the loop, so we weren’t surprised by our lack of results. But, after a string of lucky meetings and a few steps forward, we were incredibly disappointed.

Until that is, the other team members in Chicago reached out to us.

 

 **Julie Snyder (on the phone):** You’re never going to believe what just came in the mail today.

 **Sarah Koenig:** What?

 **Julie Snyder:** An anonymous tip about FOI.

 _Serial_ isn’t the FBI. We aren’t the cops. We don’t get anonymous tips, and we’re usually pretty good about keeping the lid on what our season’s topic is going to be.

 **Dana Chevis:** What does it say? What does it say?

 **Julie Snyder: “** It has come to my attention that you are looking into the mysterious rise and fall of First Order Incorporated. Before I continue, may I applaud your valiant efforts on the subject. The fact that the First Order caused so much damage yet received so little justice has offended me to my very core. I am hopeful that this season will do to them what your first season did for Adnan.

 

“Each member of the board worked with an alias, except Armitage Hux. It was determined upon the creation of the company that if it were to fall, for the wellbeing of everyone involved, Hux would bear the brunt of its damages. You’ll probably want to start first with Kyle Lauren, Hux’s right hand man. His real name is Benjamin Henry Organa, son of Senator Leia Breha Organa.”

[Next time, on _Serial_.](https://soundcloud.com/islands/15-still-dreaming-the-theme)


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